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castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.”
    “Yeah. Maybe.”
    “Maybe?” Mouse looked at her incredulously. “For sure. They’re just pissed you actually stood up for yourself. Mahfouz can talk peace and reconciliation all he wants, but if you don’t stand tall, no one gives you respect.”
    Mahlia knew he was right. Alejandro wouldn’t have let up on her if she hadn’t scared him off. For a little while, she’d been able to walk tall and not feel afraid, thanks tothat stunt with the coywolv scent. But at the same time, now she had a cloud of distrust hanging over her, and Doctor Mahfouz didn’t let her into his medicines without supervision. Goes-around-comes-around whipping back at her.
    She grimaced. “Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t matter what I do. End of the day, I’m still a castoff. They either hate me for being weak or hate me for standing tall. Can’t win that fight.”
    “So what’s really eating you?”
    “Salvatore said something else, too.” She held up the stump of her right hand, with its puckered and mottled stub of brown skin folded over. “He said Tani would still be alive if the doctor had more hands to help.”
    “Yeah? Think he’s right?”
    “Probably.” Mahlia spat over the edge. Watched her saliva do cartwheels to the ground. “Me and the doctor work good together, but a stump ain’t no hand.”
    “If you want to complain about what you got, you can always go back and ask the Army of God to take your lucky left. They’ll finish the job.”
    “You know what I mean. I ain’t complaining that you saved me. But I still can’t do anything delicate.”
    “Better than me. And I got all ten fingers.”
    “Yeah, well, you could do all this doctor work if you tried. You just got to pay attention and read what the doctor tells you to.”
    “Not hard for you, maybe. I get twitchy just looking atall those letters.” Mouse shrugged. “Maybe if I could read up here, up high, you know? But I don’t like being down in the squat, with the lantern and all that. Don’t like being closed in, you know?”
    “Yeah,” Mahlia said.
    She had the same feeling herself sometimes. The chest-tight feeling of the Fates setting you up and getting ready to kill you off. It made it hard to focus on a book, or even to sit still. Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.
    The only time Mouse seemed really at peace was when he was out in the jungle, fishing or hunting. The rest of the time he was twitchy and nervous and couldn’t sit still and damn sure couldn’t pay attention. Mahlia sometimes wondered what he would have turned out like if he’d been able to grow up on his parents’ farm, if a warlord’s patrol had never had a chance to kill his family. Maybe Mouse would have been real calm and still, then. Maybe he could have read a book all day, or been able to sleep inside a house and not be afraid of soldier boys sneaking up in the dark.
    “Hey.” Mouse tapped her. “Where’d you go?”
    Mahlia startled. She hadn’t even realized she’d drifted away. Mouse was looking at her with concern. “Don’t go off like that,” he said. “Makes me think you’ll just tip right off.”
    “Don’t nanny me.”
    “If I didn’t nanny you, you’d be dead by now. Eitherstarved or chopped up. You need Momma Mouse to look after you, castoff.”
    “If it wasn’t for me, you’d have been picked up in a patrol years ago.”
    Mouse snorted. “ ’Cause you’re all Sun Tzu stra-tee-gic?”
    “If I was strategic, I would have figured out how to get out of this place. Would have seen everything falling apart and got out while there were still ships to sail.”
    “So why didn’t you leave?”
    “My mom kept saying there were supposed to be boats for us, too. For dependents. Just kept saying it. Saying that there were supposed to be enough boats for everyone.”